English Literature 1340-1660

Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales

Chaucer (1340-1400) conceived The Canterbury Tales in 1386 when he lived some miles east of London, where he could see the pilgrim road leading to the shrine of the famous English Saint, Thomas à Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered in his cathedral in 1170. Medieval pilgrims were notorious tale tellers, and so the original plan of the work was to write about 120 stories, two for each pilgrim to tell on the way to Canterbury and two more on the way back. Chaucer, indeed, completed only 22, and the pilgrims never even get to Canterbury.

The most famous medieval work similar to The Canterbury Tales is Boccaccio's Decameron, which contains tales with plots analogous to plots found also in The Canterbury Tales, but these stories were widespread, and so there is no proof that Chaucer got them from Boccaccio. Moreover, in Boccaccio, the ten speakers belong to the same social elite, while Chaucer's pilgrim narrators represent a wide range of ranks and occupations. The variety of tellers is matched by the diversity of their tales: these are assigned to appropriate narrators and juxtaposed to bring out contrast in genre, style, tone, and values.

Chaucer conducts two fictions simultaneously, that of the individual tale and that of the pilgrim to whom he has assigned it. He develops the second fiction not only through the General Prologue but also through the links and interchanges among pilgrims connecting the stories. These interchanges sometimes lead to quarrels.

The composition of none of the tales can be accurately dated: most of them were written during the last 14 years of his life, although a few were probably written earlier and inserted into The Canterbury Tales.

Prologue

The narrator opens the General Prologue with a description of the return of spring. He describes the April rains, the burgeoning flowers and leaves, and the chirping birds. The narrator says that, around this time of the year, people begin to feel the desire to go on a pilgrimage. Many devout English pilgrims choose to travel to Canterbury to visit the relics of Saint Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, where they can thank the martyr for having helped them when they were in need.

The narrator tells us that as he was preparing to go on such a pilgrimage, staying at a tavern called the Tabard Inn, a great company of 29 travelers entered. The travelers were a diverse group who, like the narrator, were on their way to Canterbury. They happily agreed to let him join them. That night, the group slept at the Tabard and woke up early the next morning to set off on their journey. Before continuing the tale, the narrator declares the intent to list and describe each of the members of the group.

Miracle and Mystery Plays

Definition: A sequence or cycle of plays based on the Bible and produced by the city guilds, the organizations representing the various traders and crafts. Only the cycles of York and Chester towns have been preserved.

Medieval mystery plays had an immensely confident reach in both space and time. In York, for example, the theatrical space and time of this urban drama was that of the entire city, lasting from sunrise through the entire summer holiday. The time represented ran from the Fall of the Angels and the Creation of the world, till the Last Judgement. Between these extremities of the beginning and end of time, each cycle presents key episodes of Old Testament narrative.

The church had its own drama in Latin; the vernacular drama evolved from the liturgical, passing by stages from the church into the streets of the town. During the late 14th and 15th centuries, the Great English mystery cycles were formed in provincial cities developed by city guilds. A guild was also known as a mistery, from Latin ministerium, from where the name mystery play.

The performance and staging required significant investments of time and money, and often, the subject of the play corresponded to the function of the guild. In some of the cities, each guild had a wagon that served as a stage. The wagon proceeded from one strategic point in the city to another, and the play was performed a number of times on the same day. So, the cycles were public spectacles watched by every layer, and they prepared the way for the professional theater in the Age of Elizabeth the First.

Middle English Lyrics - The Cuckoo Song

Only in the late 14th century did English begin to develop an aristocratic and formal lyric that had been cultivated on the Continent by the Troubador poets in the south of France or the Italian poets characterized by the Dolce Stil nuovo. Chaucer, under the influence of French poets, wrote lovers' complaints, poetry, and verse letters in the form of ballades, roundels, and other lyric types.

Chaucer, his predecessors, and their followers were familiar with and influenced by an ancient tradition of popular songs from which only a small fraction survives. The middle English lyrics are the work of anonymous poets and are difficult to date. The topics and language in these poems are highly conventional, but they also seem fresh and spontaneous. Many are marked by strong accentual rhythms with alliteration. Some were set to music, perhaps one of the earliest, the "Cuckoo Song," is a canon or round in which the voices follow one another and join together echoing the joyous cry "cuckoo."

Everyman

It is an example of medieval drama known as a morality play. Morality plays were composed individually and they dramatized allegories of spiritual struggle. Typically, a person named Human or mankind or youth is faced with a choice between a pious life in company with Mercy, Discretion, and Good Deeds and a dissolute life among riotous companions like Lust or Mischief.

Everyman is about the Day of Judgement that every individual must face eventually. The play represents the forces, both outside and within the protagonist, that can help to save Everyman and those that cannot or that obstruct his salvation. The play contains a certain humor in showing the haste with which the hero's friends abandon him when they discover his problem. The play inculcates its austere lesson by the simplicity and directness of its language and its approach. At the end, Knowledge teaches the lesson that every Christian must learn in order to be saved. It was written near the end of the 15th century.

Sir Thomas More

More was one of the most important writers of the English Renaissance. The Catholic Church made him a saint, communists celebrated his book Utopia as a forerunner of their plan to abolish private property, and middle-class liberals have admired his vision of free public education and freedom of thought. But, at the same time, Catholic bishops of 16th-century Spain and Portugal placed Utopia on their list of prohibited books, Karl Marx did not accept More's ideas that he labelled as utopian, and liberals have noticed that More embraced the idea of the forced labor camp.

He studied at Oxford where he was torn between a career as a lawyer, as his father was, and a life of religious devotion. He tried both of them. After his law studies, he gave a series of public lectures on Saint Augustine's work. He also had a passion for Greek and Latin literature, a passion that he shared with his close friend Erasmus of Rotterdam.

For More, the love of playful, subversive wit culminated in Utopia, which he began in 1515. The book displays the strong influence of Plato's Republic, but it is also shaped by more contemporary influences such as monastic communities, emerging market societies, peasant's rebels, and voyages, especially those of Amerigo Vespucci. Those voyages showed a world seemingly free of inequality and economic exploitation.

Utopia

Book 2 of Utopia, that More composed first, describes in detail the laws and customs of a country that is similar to England, but, indeed, it is very different: there was the abolition of money and private property, and the parasitic classes - nobles, lawyers, idle priests and rapacious soldiers - have been eliminated. In Utopia, a well-ordered political democracy, education is free and universal; instead of oppressed peasants, there are prosperous collective farms. There are rational cities with free hospitals and child care. There is work for everybody and also a lot of time for all citizens to pursue the arts of peace and the pleasures of the mind and the body.

The picture of England in book 1 of Utopia - with beggars in the streets and hungry farmers, makes the sharpest contrast with the ordered and peaceable state described in book 2. Yet, book 1 is not a call for revolutionary social reform. It is a meditation, in the form of a dialogue, on the question of whether intellectuals should involve themselves in politics. The two speakers in the dialogue are a traveler named Raphael Hythloday and someone named Thomas More, who closely resembles but perhaps should not be identified with the real More.

More thinks that Hythloday, with his extraordinary learning experience and high principles, should offer his services as a councilor to one of the great monarchs of Europe. Hythloday thinks that kings would never dream of adopting the radical policies such as the abandonment of warfare and the abolition of private property. In the dialogue, Hythloday is the idealist, unwilling to dirty his hands in a pointless cause, while More is the sincere pragmatist, prepared to compromise with the system and seek to change it from within rather than give up any possibility of action. In Book 1, the debate between the two has no clear winner, but not long after completing Utopia, the real Thomas More entered the council of Henry VIII.

Book 2, Hythloday's narrative of his visit to Utopia, is also a form of dialogue. It is also a complex and ambiguous meditation on the nature of the ideal Commonwealth. The dialogue form encourages the reader to register the disturbing underside of More's island Commonwealth: Utopia is a society that rests upon slavery, there is no variety in dress or housing or cityscape, no privacy. Citizens are encouraged to value pleasure, but they are constantly monitored. There is nominal freedom of thought and toleration of religious diversity, but still, the priests can punish people for "impiety."

If there is a deep ambivalence in More's attitude toward Utopia, there is no comparable ambivalence in the other great work he wrote at the same time.

John Lyly

After receiving the degree at Oxford, Lyly went to London where his prose romance Euphues was an instant success. Subsequently, he wrote several and elegant plays acted at court by the children's companies. The title Euphues, taken from the name of that book's hero, is Greek and means graceful, witty, while the subtitle, Anatomy of Wit, means something like "analysis of the mental faculties".

The plot of the work involves a young man who leaves university for the temptation of the city, falls in love, betrays his best friend, is in turn betrayed, repents, and so shows great quantities of moral wisdom. But the plot is secondary to the prose style which has come to be known as